That Socialists will happily make common ground with the extreme left does not come as a huge surprise. They used to call these things popular fronts. However, this is what Tuffrey has said about himself on the GLA LD website: 'In his personal life, Mike supports several community, civil liberties and environmental causes and lives in Clapham'. I would have credited Cruddas with a shred more decency too, for what that's worth.

For those not altogether au fait with Hobsbawm's oeuvre, here are some choice quotes about the decrepit historian:

From Johann Hari (yes, really): "He would gladly have spied for Stalin, he explained recently and without regret, if only he had been asked. In his autobiography, he explains that he "treats the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness. He is the David Irvine (sic) of the left. Why do so many decent people associate themselves with him? I can only conclude that we have not seriously thought about the victims of the tyranny he defends".

Olive Kamm in The Times: "According to the historian Robert Conquest, Hobsbawm was asked by Michael Ignatieff in a BBC interview in 1994: “What (your view) comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?” He replied: “Yes.”...Moving to more recent panegyric, Hobsbawm remarks in On History (1997): “Fragile as the communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even nominal, use of armed coercion was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989.”

Kamm tailed his piece with this "Prospect’s “five intellectuals” are to be accorded dinner with a Cabinet minister and a newspaper editor, with the conversation recorded for the magazine. If Hobsbawm’s interlocutors have any gumption, they will refuse to sit with him".

I'm always fascinated by peacenicks and supposed full-fig pacifists who supported the SU. Such as George Lansbury, Christian pacifist. Presumably the "Great October" didn't count as violence. Nor was the Red Army an army in the bourgeois sense. Fascinating.